Find the final hourly wage if a $11.50 starting wage is increased by 2.5% each year for 8 years. Half the raise is given every 6 months.
Enough! What questions do you have about these posts?
Please do not post any more questions until you've posted YOUR thinking about these problems!
My question is how do I know which formula to use.
I see the same formula applying to each of your 5 problems, looks like exponential growth in each case.
Which formula have you learned?
My teacher briefly mentioned exponential growth, exponential decay, comping interest, and exponential growth/decay continuous.
"comping interest" ? Looks like you have to pay a bit more attention.
I am sure your teacher more than briefly mentioned this.
This is a major topic and often takes up weeks of a course.
The main formula is
amount = initialvalue (base)^time
It can be adjusted to population growth, money growth, bacteria growth,
growth of frogs in a pond, etc
for this particular problem
amount = 11.5(1.0125)^16
= ...
can you see how I fit your data into the general growth formula ?
Thanks very much for your help - and the correction (mistakes happen, especially typos), but I'm sure when I say it was a brief mention since it's an algebra class doing pre-calc.
To find the final hourly wage after 8 years, we need to calculate the increase in wage for each year and add it to the starting wage.
First, let's find the raise amount to be given every 6 months. Since half of the raise is given every 6 months, we can calculate that by multiplying the starting wage by the percentage increase and dividing it by 2:
Raise every 6 months = ($11.50 * 2.5%) / 2 = $0.2875
Now, let's calculate the yearly raise amount. Since there are two raises per year (every 6 months), we multiply the raise every 6 months by 2:
Yearly raise = $0.2875 * 2 = $0.575
Next, we calculate the total raise over 8 years by multiplying the yearly raise by the number of years:
Total raise = $0.575 * 8 = $4.60
Lastly, we add the total raise to the starting wage to find the final hourly wage:
Final hourly wage = $11.50 + $4.60 = $16.10
Therefore, the final hourly wage after 8 years would be $16.10.